Legally-bought guns used in many cop killings

Paper traces how killers got firearms in hundreds of cases

In 2005, Tucson police displayed some of the weapons they had seized to show the range of sophisticated firearms in circulation - that is, beyond the "Saturday night special."

Hattie Louise James was sitting on her front porch in Charlotte,
N.C., when two police detectives emerged from their car. There had
been a shooting, they said. Two officers were dead. The gun had
been traced back to her.

"I liked to had another heart attack," said the 72-year-old
James, a retired hospital worker.

The .32-caliber revolver used to kill Charlotte-Mecklenburg
police officers Sean Clark and Jeff Shelton in April 2007 started
out as a legally owned weapon. James bought it in 1991 at Hyatt
Coin and Gun Shop in Charlotte, but it was stolen a year later from
her husband's car. Fifteen years after that, it passed into the
hands of 25-year-old Demeatrius Montgomery.

In September, Montgomery was convicted of gunning down the
officers outside a low-income housing complex in northeast
Charlotte.

Clark and Shelton are two of 511 police officers killed by
firearms in the United States from the beginning of 2000 through
this past Sept. 30.

Until now, no one has conducted a comprehensive study of how the
killers got their guns.

To trace these guns, The Washington Post did a year-long
investigation, including building a database of every police
officer shot to death in the past decade. (More than 1,900 officers
were wounded by firearms during the same period.) Through documents
and interviews, The Post was able to track how the suspects
obtained their weapons in 341 of the deaths.

This kind of analysis is made more difficult by a law passed by
Congress in 2003 that bars federal law enforcement from releasing
information that links guns used in crimes back to the original
purchasers. To penetrate that secrecy, The Post interviewed more
than 350 police officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges,
gun dealers, gun buyers, suspects and survivors.

In 30 cases, the newspaper obtained confidential firearms traces
generated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives. The ATF's reports track guns recovered at crime scenes
back to dealers and original buyers, listing a gun's model, caliber
and serial number.

The Post review shows how guns got into the hands of police
officers' killers and - in a nation with more than 250 million guns
in circulation - how a moment of panic can have deadly
consequences.

Among the findings:

• Legal purchase was the leading source of weapons used to kill
police officers. In 107 slayings, the killers acquired their
firearms legally. In 170 deaths, The Post could not determine how
the shooters got their guns, including 29 killings in which weapons
were not recovered.

• Stolen guns turned up in 77 deaths. Separately, guns obtained
or taken from relatives or friends who legally owned them were used
in 46 killings.

• Fifty-one officers were killed when their department-issued
firearms or other officers' guns were turned against them.

• In 41 instances, guns were illegally obtained on the streets
through sale or barter.

• Sixteen times, someone bought a weapon for a person prohibited
from having a gun, an unlawful transaction known as a straw
purchase. The straw buyers were federally prosecuted in fewer than
half of those cases. Three were illegally purchased at gun shows or
from private sellers.

• The two deadliest situations for police are traffic stops and
domestic disputes. Ninety-one of the officers were killed while
making traffic stops; 76 were responding to domestic-disturbance
calls. The officers killed at traffic stops were generally slain by
felons wielding illegal guns; the weapons used to kill police in
domestic situations were often obtained through legal purchases.
Only 13 percent of the weapons in the traffic stops were legal,
compared with 47 percent in the domestic calls.

• More than 200 of the shooters were felons who were prohibited
by federal law from possessing firearms. Many had spent time in
prison for illegal handgun possession. At least 45 were on
probation or parole when they killed an officer. At least four were
previously convicted of murder or manslaughter, including a Texas
man who had done time for two separate slayings and was on parole
at the time he killed his third victim: a 40-year-old sheriff's
deputy with a wife and three children.

• Handguns were used to kill 365 officers; long guns - rifles
and shotguns - were used to kill 140 officers.

The ratio of handguns to long guns in The Post review - about 70
percent to 30 percent - is close to being the inverse of the ratio
of all guns in the nation: 40 percent handguns to 60 percent long
guns.

But the ratio found by The Post matches that for U.S. homicides
in general, experts say, reflecting the preference among criminals
for handguns because they are generally cheaper and easier to
conceal.

The most common handgun used was the 9mm semiautomatic pistol,
which was used to kill at least 85 of the police officers.